Treasurer [I am not an economist] Joe Hockey has hit back at his Liberal predecessor Peter Costello, rejecting criticism that the Government's tax policy looks like a "morbid joke".

Mr Costello, who was treasurer for 11 years in the Howard government, has written an opinion piece in News Corp newspapers, declaring that the current debate about tax is "debased".

He said the Coalition's mantra of wanting "lower, simpler, fairer" taxes had given way to demands for "higher, more complicated and less economic" taxes.

"'Lower, simpler, fairer is looking like some kind of morbid joke," Mr Costello said.

Mr Hockey, who is in New York for meetings with G20 counterparts and the International Monetary Fund, said "Mr Costello is wrong".

"Quite frankly, I really wish I had the revenue that Peter Costello had," he told the ABC's AM program.

"If I had the same revenue as he had, then I'd be getting $25 billion extra each year to spend on things."

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And someone of the Fran/Liberal show on the ABC this morning responded to her "question" which was in the vein of: "we need to hammer welfare, don't we?" to which the Liberal (CONservative) someone responded something like: "our corporate tax rate is too high compared to those of Singapore and others... blah blah blah..." It was an atrocious odiously trying to sell another crooked budget... while reminding us that the rich got hit with a "fix-the-deficit" levy to which we have not a clue if it has collected one cent, while the budget is going down, down, down much further than the prices at Coles...

He added that we've got to have cash in the government's coffers to weather another storm like the GFC (because it's possible there is another one looming around the corner). Hell I can assure you having more cash in the government's coffer won't make a cent of difference as should the world economy goes arse up, every country, especially those like Japan, the US and all of Europe would go down the drain like a in toilet flush. 

 Meanwhile as a reader of the Sydney Morning Herald reminds us:

Health, education, pensions and welfare are cut to the bone; youth unemployment is soaring; people's savings are to be taxed; the Pacific Peso is wallowing; asylum seekers and their children are tortured and raising that most iniquitous of taxes, the GST, is constantly mooted.

Meanwhile, multinational corporations get away with avoiding billions of dollars in taxation, mining giants receive generous concessions, housing is unaffordable, billionaires call for pay cuts for our lowest paid workers – and support for the LNP is *still* over 45 per cent?

Fred Pilcher Kaleen ACT

Yes Fred... The LNP is selling shit sandwiches through its portal "the merde-och press" in particular and the MMMM in general... 

Amid Russia's economic woes, billions of dollars continue to disappear in offshore havens. The net outflow of capital from Russia reached $32.6 billion during the first quarter of 2015, according to the nation's Central Bank. 

The bank is now forecasting that capital flight may reach $131 billion by the end of the year. In reporting first quarter numbers, the Central Bank also upwardly revised the 2014 figure for net capital outflow to $154.1 billion from the previously reported $151.5 billion. That figure marks the highest annual total of capital flight since the Central Bank started tracking the trend back in 1994. 

Financial experts say most of the money now fleeing Russia ends up in offshore accounts, beyond the reach of tax inspectors and other prying eyes. The budgetary implications for Russia are significant: according to Andrei Makarov, chairman of the Russian Duma's Committee on Budget and Taxation, back in 2013, when the capital flight rate was dramatically lower than it is now, capital flight cost the Russian treasury at least $22 billion in lost tax revenue.

"Capital outflow abroad leads to losses that are at least comparable to internal tax revenue losses," state-owned news channel Russia 24 reported, citing data from KPMG, a large international audit, tax and advisory firm.

The problem is not limited to tax revenue losses. "Capital flight weakens the national economy, starving it of investment funding, which further worsens the economy's development prospects," wrote economists Mikhail Gelvanovskiy and Vladislav Ovchinskiy in an academic paper that examined the economic damage done by capital flight amid the 2008 economic crisis.

read more: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/russia-massive-capital-flight-continues/520112.html

See also: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/four-celebrities-who-secretly-wish-they-were-russian/520104.html

In the first quarter of 2015, in the sixth year of the historic Obama recovery, the U.S. economy grew by two-tenths of 1 percent.And that probably sugarcoats it.

For trade deficits subtract from the growth of GDP, and the U.S. trade deficit that just came in was a monster. As the AP’s Martin Crutsinger writes, “The U.S. trade deficit in March swelled to the highest level in more than six years, propelled by a flood of imports that may have sapped the U.S. economy of any growth in the first quarter.”

The March deficit was $51.2 billion, largest of any month since 2008. In goods alone, the trade deficit hit $64 billion. As Crutsinger writes, a surge in imports to $239 billion in March, “reflected greater shipments of foreign-made industrial machinery, autos, mobile phones, clothing and furniture.”

What does this flood of imports of things we once made here mean for a city like, say, Baltimore? Writes columnist Allan Brownfeld:

Baltimore was once a city where tens of thousands of blue collar employees earned a good living in industries building cars, airplanes and making steel. … In 1970, about a third of the labor force in Baltimore was employed in manufacturing. By 2000, only 7 percent of city residents had manufacturing jobs.

Put down blue-collar Baltimore alongside Motor City, Detroit, as another fatality of free-trade fanaticism. For as imports substitute for U.S. production and kill U.S. jobs, trade deficits reduce a nation’s GDP. And since Bill Clinton took office, the U.S. trade deficits have totaled $11.2 trillion. An astronomical figure.

It translates not only into millions of manufacturing jobs lost and tens of thousands of factories closed, but also millions of manufacturing jobs that were never created, and tens of thousands of factories that did not open here, but did open in Mexico, China, and other Asian countries.

In importing all those trillions in foreign-made goods, we exported the future of America’s young. Our political and corporate elites sold out working- and middle-class America—to enrich the monied class. And they sure succeeded.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/the-bankruptcy-of-u-s-trade-and-foreign-policy/